Michigan Nigella

Few cut flowers do two jobs as gracefully as Nigella. The starry, many-petaled blooms open in sky blue, white, and pale rose, each one nested in a haze of thread-fine foliage that earns the plant its common name, love-in-a-mist. As the flowers fade they swell into striped, balloon-shaped seed pods that designers prize just as much as the blossoms, so a single planting keeps giving well past its first flush.

Nigella is not a Michigan native. It is a cottage-garden annual native to southern Europe, north Africa, and southwest Asia that our member farmers grow from spring sowings across the region. It happens to suit our climate well, since it favors the cool, damp weather of an early Michigan summer and is among the first specialty annuals to flower here, opening in June and carrying on into August before real heat pushes it to set pods and seed.

Because Nigella is fine-stemmed and short-lived once cut, it does not survive a long truck ride the way sturdier flowers can. That is where a local collective earns its keep, since our Michigan farmers cut it the morning you pick up, just down the road, so the stems still have the freshness and easy bend that shipped flowers lose. Reserve a DIY bucket for your own arranging, ask us to tuck Nigella into a mixed bucket, or let our floral designers work it into your wedding or event.